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Tag: pounce

How do you trick a criminal? Well, using money to lure criminals out of hiding seemed to work for the Thai police force. It seems that most criminals are naturally greedy people judging by the results of the operation in the article above.

There was some interesting vocabulary here, too. The first interesting word was in the title:

Thai police dupe fugitives with fake prize draw

To ‘dupe‘ someone means to trick him or her. In this case, the trick is that the criminals were not getting a prize. Instead, they were getting a trip to jail! ‘Prize draw‘ is an interesting expression, too. We’ve seen it before on the World of Words in this article about the lottery in Italy.

The next interesting word is ‘nabbed‘. In this case, it means the criminals were arrested but is can also mean to ‘take’. For example “Who nabbed that last chocolate bar?”.

In the next paragraph, it is mentioned that Pol. Lt-Gen. Krisada Pankongchoen ‘masterminded‘ the plan meaning that he invented it and put it into action.

Slightly later in the article, we can see the phrasal verb ‘fall for (something)‘. This means to allow yourself to be tricked. We can also use ‘fall for (someone)‘ to mean starting to have romantic feelings about a person.

The last piece of vocabulary I would like to look at today is ‘pounced‘. This means to attack quickly in order to catch something. We often use it to talk about the way cats catch mice. They move very slowly until they are close to the mouse. Then, when they are close enough, they ‘pounce’ and move very quickly to catch the mouse. In this case, the police did a similar thing with the criminals.